Openness: Purity of Essence

I wrote a piece for Linux Journal recently warning that Microsoft was beginning to hijack the meaning of the phrase "open source". But the problem is much bigger than this: the other opens face similar pressures, as Peter Murray-Rust notes.

In some ways it's even more serious for fledgling movements like open access and open data: there, the real meaning has barely been established, and so defending it is harder than for open source, which has had a well-defined definition for some time. Given the importance of labels, this is a matter that needs to be addressed with some urgency before "open access" and "open data" become little more than bland marketing terms.